learning, we need to understand that it’s not only repetition that is important but speed as well. The brain is designed to recognize patterns, and the pattern needs to be presented rapidly enough for the human to be able to perceive the pattern for what it is.
Most people have drawn a series of stick figures in the margins of their schoolbooks, then flipped through them to make the figure appear to move. Each page has on it a static image, but the brain will find a pattern—in this case, movement—if the images run rapidly enough.
We wouldn’t be able to enjoy movies without this process. We’d never be able to understand the story if we only saw one frame a day.
So, when we dream, we’re running through things to learn, and we’re not doing it in real time. “Internal” time differs from clock time in that we can expand or contract it. We learn at extraordinary speed—we can do maybe eight hours worth of work in five minutes before waking up. Sleep researchers support this idea. Subjects who report massively long and complex dreams are found through neural scanning to have been dreaming for only minutes, or even seconds, at a time.
Sleep, therefore, is one of the ways we program and reprogram ourselves. If you doubt your own ability to do this, try this out tonight:
As you’re settling down to go to sleep, look at the clock, and tell yourself several times very firmly that you’re going to wake up at a specific time. Set the alarm if you like, but you will wake up a second or two before it goes off.
This is something I’ve encountered in several different cultures. Some people gently bang the pillow with their heads the same number of times as the hour they want to get up.
Others tap their heads or their forearms to set their wake-up time. Whichever way it’s done, the principle is the same; you somehow “know” you have an internal clock that you can set, using a specific ritual, and no matter how deeply you sleep, it will wake you as effectively as any alarm.
If we can program ourselves to do one little thing—such as waking without an alarm—we can program our minds to do many things. We can decide to go to the supermarket. Maybe we need bread, milk, peanut butter, and a couple of cartons of juice. We can drive five miles to the supermarket, walk through a thousand products, maybe talking to someone on our cell phone, and still remember the juice, peanut butter, milk, and bread.
Academics sometimes challenge me for something they call “evidence.” They want to know the theory behind what I do; they want me to explain it, preferably with the appropriate research references. I’ve even had people ask for the correct citations for things that I’ve made up. The way I see it, it’s not my job to prove, or even understand, everything about the workings of the mind. I’m not too interested in why something should work. I only want to know how, so I can help people affect and influence whatever they want to change.
The truth is, when we know how something is done, it becomes easy to change. We’re highly programmable beings—as unpopular as that idea still is in some quarters. When I started using the term “programming,” people became really angry. They said things like, “You’re saying we’re like machines. We’re human beings, not robots.”
Actually, what I was saying was just the opposite. We’re the only machine that can program itself. We are “meta-programmable.” We can set deliberately designed, automated programs that work by themselves to take care of boring, mundane tasks, thus freeing up our minds to do other, more interesting and creative, things.
At the same time, if we’re doing something automatically that we shouldn’t be doing—whether overeating, smoking, being afraid of elevators or the outside world, becoming depressed, or coveting our neighbor’s spouse—then we can program ourselves to change. That’s not being a robot; that’s becoming a free spirit.
To me the definition of freedom is being able to use your conscious mind to direct your unconscious activity. The unconscious mind is hugely powerful, but it needs direction. Without direction, you might end up grasping for straws…and then finding there just aren’t any there at all.
The Secret of Effortless Change
VIRGINIA SATIR, THE FAMILY THERAPIST, once said something that has stayed with me for many years. She said: “You know, Richard, most people think the will to survive is the strongest instinct in human beings, but it isn’t. The strongest instinct is to keep things familiar.”
She was right. I’ve known people willing to kill themselves because they can’t face the thought of life without the partner who’s died or left them for someone else. Even thinking about how things could be different overwhelms them with fear.
There’s a reason for this. One of the ways we make models of the world is by generalizing. We survive and prosper by making things familiar, but we also create problems for ourselves.
Each day you see new doors, but at a practical level you know each is still just a door. You don’t have to figure out what each one is and how to open it. You shake hands with thousands of people, and even though it’s a brand-new hand each time, it’s not a new event, because somehow you’ve made it “the same.” It’s been filed in the compartment in your brain called “shaking hands.”
But if you go to a country such as Japan where traditions differ, and you stick out your hand and someone bows to you instead, that action completely shatters the pattern. You have to come back to your senses to figure out how to respond in that new situation.
But that’s the way it’s supposed to work. When we’re really thinking properly, we make everything familiar until the pattern doesn’t function anymore. Then we review it and revise the way we’re thinking.
Sometimes, though, we make something familiar, and even when it doesn’t function anymore, we stick with it, and that’s when it starts to make our lives dysfunctional. Instead of redefining the situation and coming up with a new behavior, we keep doing the same thing…only harder!
Pop psychologists talk about “the comfort zone” when they should more accurately be calling it “the familiarity zone.” People persist in situations that are extremely uncomfortable simply because they’re used to them. They’re unaware that they have choices, or perhaps the choices they present to themselves—like being alone for the rest of their lives because they’d left an abusive partner—are so terrifying that they refuse to change.
For years, psychologists have tortured rats by making them do things like run mazes for bits of cheese. The interesting thing about these experiments is that, when the scientists change the position of the cheese, the rats only try the same way three or four times before starting to explore other possible routes. When humans replace the rats, however, they just keep on and on and on, in the hopes that if they just do the same thing often enough they’ll get the desired result.
Apart from proving that rats are smarter than people, these experiments show us that people will often stick to their habits until they’re forced to change…or die to avoid that change.
All the work I do to accomplish change is based on one important principle. I go in and find out what works and what doesn’t work. I slice away what isn’t working and replace those areas with new states of consciousness that work better. It’s as simple as that.
The way I see it, there are three steps to making enduring
